August 20, 2006

Startling Discovery on a Failed Expedition

On the way back from Rochester today, we stopped at Country Whip in Acushnet to get the kids some ice cream. I convinced Maggie to let me park the car close to a nearby cache and run to get it while they finished their snack.

I grabbed my gear and ran for where I thought the cache was, about 400 feet into some small woods. When I got in there I was surprised to find that the floor of the woods were covered with ferns. Starting just 1 foot off the trail in every direction, ferns were growing about 18 inches off the ground, out of the pine needles and rotting fallen trees. “Well, there’s a new twist” I thought.

After fumbling around for a few minutes, I wasn’t getting anywhere and I knew that time was running out. I couldn’t see through the ferns and the cache description led me to believe that the cache itself might be covered with pine needles, so I was wondering if I was going to have to trip over the cache to find it. I turned around and shuffled some underbrush to see if I could make contact with anything.

Suddenly, the ferns erupted right in front of me! I jumped back and banged my shoulder into a tree as I saw a small spotted fawn bounding away from me, back and forth toward a nearby hill. I pressed myself against the tree as my heart pounded from the shock, from hitting the tree and from the excitement. I’d never been that close to a wild deer before.

The fawn stopped at the crest of the hill, now about 70 feet away, and looked back at me. I didn’t have my camera, so I reached for my camera phone, but the trees and the distance were going to make it an iffy shot. As I moved to get a better angle, the fawn decided it had had enough and ran off. No picture.

I found this picture of a fawn hiding in foliage. Although that fawn appears to be hiding in some poison ivy, the one I saw was almost completely hidden by ferns. When I startled my fawn I was about seven feet away, give or take a foot. It was amazing.

I took a moment to try to regain my calm geocache-seeking mind, but then it occurred to me that if I couldn’t see a deer a few feet in front of me under the ferns then I wasn’t going to find the cache very quickly. I should do this cache when the ferns are less plentiful.

I returned to the car with only my story and no cache find. But that somehow felt OK.

Come to my house. Last year we had one living in the "thicket" made by pines in our backyard. Let me walk right up to it. Then I made animal control encourage it back to the woods so a) it wouldn't get hit by a car and b) would stop wrecking my darn weeping cherry. :)